would not recall the smug tidiness of Duffryn House, whose clean-cut lawns and well-trimmed hedges are fit surroundings of a mansion where luxurious comfort reigns. A ghost which confines itself to the cellar and the garden need disturb neither the merrymaking nor the slumbers of the guests.
St. Donat’s Castle is down on the southern coast of Glamorganshire, in a primitive region not yet profaned by railroads, nor likely to be perhaps for many years to come. It is owned and inhabited by a worthy gentleman whose ancestors for seven centuries sleep in the graveyard under the old castle wall. Its favourite ghost—for to confine this or any other ancient Welsh castle to a single ghost would be almost disrespectful—is that of Lady Stradling, who was done away with by some of her family in those wicked old times when families did not always dwell in peace together. This ghost makes a practice of appearing when any mishap is about to befall a member of the house of Stradling—the direct line of which is, however, extinct, a fact not very well apprehended among the neighbouring peasantry. She wears high-heeled shoes and a long trailing gown of the finest silk. In this guise doth she wander up and down the long majestic halls and chambers, and, while she wanders, the castle hounds refuse to rest, but with their howlings raise all the dogs of the village under the hill.
V.
Ghosts of this sort are vague and purposeless in character, beyond a general blood-curdling office which in all ghosts doth dwell. They haunt not only castles and family mansions, but bridges, rocks, and roads, objectless but frightful. The ghost of Pont Cwnca Bach, near Yscanhir, in Carmarthenshire, frightens people off the bridge into the rivulet. Many belated peasants have had this dire experience at the little bridge, afterwards wandering away in a dazed condition, and finding themselves on recovering at some distance from home, often in the middle of a bog. In crossing this bridge people were seized with ‘a kind of cold dread,’ and felt ‘a peculiar sensation’ which they could not describe, but which the poorest fancy can no doubt imagine. Another purposeless spectre exists in the legend of Catrin Gwyn, told in Cardiganshire. The ruin of a shepherd’s cottage, standing on a mountain waste near the river Rheidol, is the haunt of this spectre. A peasant who was asked to escort a stranger up the narrow defile of rocks by the ruin, in horror exclaimed, ‘Yn enw y daioni, peidiwch,’ (in the name of heaven, sir, don’t go!) ‘or you’ll meet White Catti of the Grove Cave.’ ‘And what’s that?’ ‘An evil spirit, sir.’ And the superstitious peasant would neither be laughed nor reasoned out of his fears. Catrin was the bride of a young shepherd living near Machynlleth in 1705. One day she went to market with a party of other peasants, who separated from her on the return way at a point two miles from Gelli Gogo. She was never more seen alive. A violent storm arose in the night, and next day a scrap of her red cloak was found on the edge of a frightful bog, in which she is believed to have disappeared in the darkness and storm. The husband went mad; their cottage fell to decay; and to this day the shepherds declare that Catti’s ghost haunts the spot. It is most often seen, and in its most terrific shape, during howling storms, when it rides on the gale, shrieking as it goes.[64]
FOOTNOTE:
[64] ‘Camb. Quarterly,’ i., 452.
VI.
Few Cambrian spirits are devoid of a didactic purpose. Some teach reverence for the dead,—a lesson in great request among the rising generation in Wales and elsewhere. The church at Tregaron, Cardiganshire, was being rebuilt in 1877, and certain skulls were turned up by the diggers in making new foundations. The boys of Tregaron amused themselves playing ball with the skulls, picking out their teeth, banging them against the wall to see if they would break, and the like.[65] They probably never heard the story told by Mrs. Morgan of Newport to the Prophet Jones: of some people who were drinking at an inn there, ‘two of them officers of excise,’ when one of the men, to show his courage, declared he was afraid of no ghosts, and dared go to the charnel house and fetch a skull from that ghastly place. This bold and dangerous thing he did, and the men debated, over their beer, whether it was a male or a female skull, and concluded it was a woman’s, ‘though the grave nearly destroys the difference between male and female before the bones are turned to dust, and the difference then quite destroyed and known only to God.’ After a jolly hour over the skull, the bold one carried it back and left it where he got it; but as he was leaving the church, suddenly a tremendous blast like a whirlwind seized him, and so mauled and hauled him that his teeth chattered in his head and his knees knocked together, and he ever after swore that nothing should tempt him to such a deed again. He was still more convinced that the ghost of the original owner of the skull had been after him, when he got home, and his wife told him that his cane, which hung in the room, had been beating against the wall in a dreadful manner.
FOOTNOTE:
[65] ‘Western Mail,’ Dec. 14, 1877.